Blog

In the sound studio recording an audio paper on voice as infrastructure together with great colleagues!

Mainstream discourses emphasize voice-based technology as practical assistants, and thus figure voice as a practical means to achieve certain ends. But there is more to voice interactions than merely distributing messages and articulating commands. Voice-based interactions create sonic environments, enact affect, identities, likes and dislikes. The project explores the co-existence of people and voice-based technologies ethnographically, and through the STS concept of infrastructure and a cultural anthropological view on voice. Voice-based interactions can be seen as infrastructures that link the realms of the technical, cultural and sociopolitical to the level of the individual, creating sites where shared discourses and values, affect, and aesthetics are made manifest in and contested through embodied and material practice. 

We conducted a preworkshop in AIR Lab on the 30th of November 2022 with selected experts. Here we tested the vocabulary developed based in Fach, voice training and paralinguistic cultures. We also tested digital (VR) and physical formats for activating the vocabulary meaningfully in individual and collective listenings of voices.  We will use the great and in-depth feedback we got  to develop tools and vocabulary for the workshop at VEGA Lab spring 2023.

We hosted a session “Sonic Interactions: Voice, AI & Robots” at the Digital Tech Summit, October 26th 2022. The session explored the growing area of sound in HCI and interaction design by focusing on how to develop, design and evaluate different forms of sonic interaction. Moving from synthetic voice design via AI/chatbots to how we communicate with robots via sound, the session presented recent findings. We also gave a talk in the session on “Voice as a matter of Design”: In the last decade, voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Home, and Amazon’s Echo have become a billion-dollar industry. The assistants all rely on Voice-based User Interfaces (VUIs) that both specify what the devices can listen for and how they should express themselves through synthetic voice design. Today, these VUIs are designed based on commercial interests and values that deeply influence the role they can play in our everyday lives. Current primarily Western VUI designs often present us with anthropomorphic and heteronormative vocal stereotypes and resulting interaction scenarios. But voices are complex, variable and diverse; the minute nuances of tone of voice influence the affective tonality and interpretation of what and how we are trying to communicate in sociocultural contexts. Voice is both a matter of expression and of being heard, and connects deeply to feelings of intimacy, identity, sociality and performativity. This talk explores the voice as a design material that manifest as aural experience, sonic culture and acoustic politics.